anna, a criticality incident at the gender accelerator@anna@hexile.witches.live
Wrote a post in reply to someone with some further context about the whole thing that went down with ehjovan that has been used repeatedly to post-facto justify destroying my instance and our community as me being some kind of giant harassing racist, and I think it's time I make clear the huge part of this that is missing, though some of it does come out in my posts in the background posted by fedilore here:
https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/112169508646343514
The thing left out of that thread outside of some oblique-ish references in screenshots is that the person i was accused of "harassing" was someone i was told was some presumed-white fuckjerry-style instagram influencer bro and i wanted them to block my instance because at the time (and still to a degree) blocks don't work if they're not mutual. I had in several previous occasions annoyed admins of servers that I didn't want to gobble up all my users' posts into blocking us after asking nicely didn't work, and yeah I didn't want some instagram bros harassing my users behind some half-working mirrorglass block!
Silly as that may be, that was my impetus and always was; I was misinformed of the kind of people were on ehjovan and who ejhovan himself was and was trying to protect my users from an internet subculture that would go on to be known for such great hits as Fyre Festival. However, after some barbs back and forth, I actually got to know ehjovan who wasn't an asshole and mostly just confused by my demands to block witches, and in the process got to know him better and made some friends on his instance. After I had realized my error and stopped demanding a mutual block, I learned that ehjovan was not some white fuckjerry instagram influencer bro, but actually a gay black man with a great (if somewhat canceldon-incompatible, which was where the bad information i had in the first place came from) sense of humor. At no point did I both know ehjovan was black and was pestering him, so it is and has been pretty ridiculous to call me racist or accuse me of "targeting PoC" for this. I had a lot of fun with him and some of the people on that instance, and I still miss them to this day.
Part of what's so fucked up about are0h's harassment is that I do not believe for a second that he doesn't know about the reconciliation, as the weeks of shitposting with ehjovan dot social (I think that was the url) was much longer than like, the one evening I spent angling for a mutual block. I was probably the first naive fool to think that well, if I can turn things around with ehjovan, I'm sure I can work things out with are0h. And I did, foolishly as I recount in the fedilore thread I linked above, try to do just that. However all I got was a bunch of insinuations that everything I said was some anti-black dogwhistle and that if I knew any black people I wouldn't say things like that; his usual racebaiting schtick. While of course these accusations aren't true, including of the witches.live userbase, he knows and you know, that there is no way to respond to allegations like that without sounding like an asshole as no matter how hard I tried it would have course been turned into reducing what I said to the mating call of the typical racist; "I can't be I have black friends!" As I am not a "virulent racist" as he accuses me of being, nor an unaware dipshit that is a stranger to this kind of discourse, I'm not about to tokenize my friends as defense in an online argument anyway. There's some very personal things that happened in the fallout from are0h's harassment campaign and all I am willing to say, after half a fucking decade of this bullshit, and I still wish I could just keep on keeping it to myself, is that he did contribute to endangering the life of my best friend, and no, she's not white.
This is why are0h needs to stop being given the benefit of the doubt or considered any better than even the horrible, monstrous white trans women he conjures up in his fables. The kind of reactionary behavior he exhibits is well known for projection so naturally he is no exception. And of course, if I'm not a two dimensional cardboard cutout, mustache-twirling racist, he can't grift off of being the protector and savior and lone voice of black people on the fediverse. He can't deputize my former friends as attack dogs to repeatedly smear me as this horrible, irredeemable bigot as a post-facto justification for his careless destruction of what was once a thriving community that I poured countless hours into tending and caring for, and many were deeply hurt by losing something they had considered home. No, if he did that it would disprove racism as a solvable problem, and inter-community dialog as a thing that can create a better world for everyone, and even worse it wouldn't let him cash out pearlclutching liberals' guilt into gofundme money on the backs of queer people that said liberals don't give the slightest shit about.